Can you guess what’s inside?
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The immensly popular Science & Cooking public lecture series offered by Harvard will return on September 6. Seating last year was on a first come, first serve basis, and apparently many talks were full hours before they started. So be warned if you plan to attend in person. Luckily the classes are filmed and are freely available via Youtube and iTunes. This year’s schedule has some topics/speakers from last year as well as a couple of new ones. Just like last year, the public lecture series is given alongside the course “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter” which is reserved for currently enrolled Harvard students. The course is a joint effort of The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (“SEAS”) and the Alícia Foundation.

The lecture schedule for the 2011 fall semester is as follows (exact dates and locations here):
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Jeff working on a recipe in his kitchen. (Photo by Shimon Rura. © 2009 Atof Inc.)

For a book about food this is a rather unusual book. The author states in the preface that the goal of the book is to “point out new ways of thinking about the tools” that are found in the kitchen. It’s not a book you’ll pick up for its recipes, even though the 100+ recipes included are fine. And it’s not a book you would pick up because of mouthwatering photographs of food. It is however a book that could trigger a lifelong interest in cooking among those who are scientifically minded. Where an experienced chef can read between the lines of a recipe, the rest of us can turn to books like Cooking for geeks to get hints on how to turn a recipe into a tasty dish.
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You can tell that the days were packed during my visits to Belgium (The Flemish Primitives) and Denmark (Molecular gastronomy seminar) in March by the fact that I still blog about it in June. After the sous vide masterclass I attended a master class on taste technologies hosted by Quico Sosa (the man behind the Sosa company) and chef Dave De Belder. Many may frown upon flavors and their use in high end gastronomy, but anyone who considers using flavors as a shortcut to better cooking should rethink this as both successes and disasters are amplified (interestingly, Bruno Goussault said exactly the same about sous vide in the preceeding masterclass).

In haute cuisine, technology must be at the service of flavour and not otherwise. We must escape from the myth that everything was better in the past and also, that everything new is better. (“The technology of flavours”, Sosa ingredients)

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